a survey of faculty member's teaching load in university

this study deals with the degree of faculty members' teaching load, its relationship with their specialties and also the relationship between the teachers' satisfaction and the quantity and quality of their academic responsibilities based on three variables of faculty, gender, and academic rank. this study is both qualitative and quantitative. the required data were gathered through the study of documents and papers (a quantitative method) and interview (a qualitative method). the population of this study was the faculty members' of mazandaran university in the educational year of 1385-86. 222 faculty members were selected for quantitative part of the study. among them 16 faculty members were selected as qualified cases for qualitative part. for analyzing the data gathered through documents and interview, respectively, descriptive statistics and inductive analysis were used. the analysis of the data gathered through documents indicates that faculty members' mean of teaching load during the given time period was 50.81. the 3 top faculties in this part were, respectively, chemistry faculty with 50.01, official and economics, and natural sciences. regarding the teaching load based on sex, the results show that female faculty members' mean of teaching load was less than that of the males. the data related to extra cases show the same result. based on academic rank, the professors' teaching load and extra teaching were higher than that of the other academic ranks. the results about course variety show that the total course number in the mazandaran university is 3293. considering 228 fee faculty member and 222 formal faculty member, each member, in average, has 7 courses. humanities faculty with 696 courses has the greatest number of courses; and art and architecture faculty with 41 courses has the least numbers of course. in terms of gender, mal members have 3000 courses and female members, 293. and also, in terms of academic rank, assistant professors with 2241 courses have the greatest number of courses. the results indicate that there was no significant relationship between the faculty members' specialty and their course verity. on the other hand, there was a consensus among faculty members regarding the amount of teaching load and the quantity and quality of their academic responsibilities. based on these variables as faculty, sex, and academic rank, there was no difference in faculty members' opinions. they were unsatisfied about the quantity and quality of their academic responsibilities.